Authors: Daniel Buckman
Mike Spence went out into the sunny cold, this duty morning, and realized that he was the only uniform who still wore the hat. Now, Susan and Rosen were the same: just dead, their cases filed in metal drawers where mice with tough teeth had burrowed inside and shat in the folders. He didn’t know how long he should care about either one.
* * *
That night, Mike sat breathing hard after his run. He’d done six miles in thirty-six minutes, and ran wishing the woman would be lying over a car hood when he returned to Claremont Street. He stretched his legs and hoped the rain would warm. But she was not on a car, and her window was dark. Even after he showered with Zest, his mind still wouldn’t quiet. This woman could be like a joint.
The apartment seemed to grow smaller, the doors shrinking, the windows fading into squares. He felt unwired because he understood why the killer left the pictures, and thinking about it kept his lungs from slowing. This guy showed people, but he was sad and pathetic to think murder could make a difference. He’d probably lived his life plotting this revenge, and he’d wasted many good hours. Mike guessed he surprised himself by actually killing Mike Rosen.
But General Loan shooting the VC was the perfect image. Mike couldn’t do that with a hundred novels. Too bad the cops watched more ESPN than History Channel and couldn’t get the gag.
Mike fantasized
60 Minutes
running the story. He’d be talking to Steve Croft, happy with the man’s football coach cynicism, himself already promoted to homicide detective. Steve Croft would see the killer as a man who lived in the past too long, and tried to dialogue with the protected world, using the pictures because he’d never been able to stop thinking about the ways they affected his idea of Vietnam being purposeful. Having reported from Bien Hoa during the war, Croft would know how history had made this guy.
He and Croft would make some points together. Afterward, he saw himself telling Kenjuan Mills where to go smile and lick. He’d carry the gold homicide shield, and Mills might become a property crimes detective. But, in the end, the
60 Minutes
story would be sandwiched between an exposé on why the U.S. Government spends fifty bucks for a six-dollar hammer, and a profile of a young soprano who makes Met audiences speak in tongues.
Mike then called Dilger without thinking about it. Like Croft, his old friend would understand what the murderer was doing. He dialed 411, said Edward Dilger, Burkburnett, Texas, and the operator connected him for no extra charge. Inside a minute, Dilger was drawling hello, and before Mike responded, he imagined a house trailer with an oil pump in the backyard and lots of white-hazy sky.
“Dilger,” Mike said into the phone, “it’s Spence.”
“God dog.”
“You still sucking air, sunshine?”
“I’m tougher than the guy you named me after in your book,” Dilger said back. “I never regretted trying to break up Chopper and Bozak that night, but the consequences were hard.”
“I needed a moral center,” Mike said.
“What?”
“You were the sensitive guy among those shaven-headed maniacs.”
“No, Spence,” Dilger said. “That was you.”
His old friend sounded good, but Mike dismissed Dilger’s peace as the result of hitting the twelfth “get-real” step in AA. The oil derrick was still pumping in the backyard.
“I got something to tell you,” Mike said.
“You still a writer?”
“I’m a cop now.”
“You sucked as a soldier. But now you get to lie without all the hard work of writing.”
Mike figured Dilger was sober. All the better if AA did it.
He told him about the killer and the picture. He spoke plainly and Dilger listened without interruption. Mike then told him about the woman posing in her window and how she waited for him one night, lying on wet leaves, but he left out Susan’s death. Dilger didn’t know about her, and Mike didn’t know how to start. But the hooker felt like a long nap. He made sure his old friend knew that.
“Play with the hooker,” Dilger told him, “but forget the picture. It’s about Iraq now. Here in North Texas, people want to win this coming war. Vietnam is not on their minds.”
“But they are repeating a war.”
“Who wants to be reminded of a mistake when you’re wanting to win.”
Mike pushed the receiver into his mouth.
“Every war repeats a war, Spence,” Dilger said. “It’s how we understand them.”
Mike listened while Dilger spat Copenhagen into a Coke can. The motion would be the same: Dilger leaning to his left and shooting the dark spit from the side of his mouth, but Mike couldn’t imagine his face having any trace of the soldier boy who scored with Georgetown girls. After the army, Dilger moved to Florida and listened only to Metallica, and started using speed instead of running in the morning. Inside two years, Dilger had lost it.
“One Jiffy Lube is a pain in the neck,” Dilger said. “But four pay.”
“You running Jiffy Lubes?”
“People are getting too fat to change their own oil, Spence. It’s easy money. Most Americans can’t fit under their cars.”
“How’d you get started with that?”
“A lawyer got my discharge fixed,” he said. “The next day, I applied for a VA small business loan and took some accounting courses at the junior college.”
“I always guessed you liked lube on your hands,” Mike said.
“You don’t get it, Spence. I own the Jiffy Lubes. I only changed oil in the franchisee training course. Are you still getting paid for telling lies?”
“That’s why I should look into the picture. I could figure this out.”
“I thought you liked the killer. You said the killer is speaking for us. He saw men fall and burn when nobody really cared.”
“I could find him. These detectives don’t understand the crime scene. I’d be set in the department.”
“You ever quit?”
Mike Spence said nothing and held the receiver. Edward Dilger was fine. Mike had been wrong these years.
“Get a VA business loan,” Dilger said. “Figure out what to sell. In the end, it’s only you caring about this bullshit.”
“It happened to you, Dilge. The MPs beat you for nothing while frat boys did beer bongs.”
“That’s why I can say the future amputees coming home from Iraq aren’t going to listen about Vietnam or care about frat boys. You have to realize the inevitability of things or you’ll never move on.”
“Why did we have to watch men fall on fire. You remember wanting to get them, and not knowing how.”
“We could have stayed home and worked at Kmart, then figured out how to get promoted.”
“You didn’t do that.”
“You didn’t either.”
Mike jumped when the buzzer sounded. He tried looking out the window, but couldn’t see the street from where he sat.
“Is that your door?” Dilger said.
“It’s nothing.”
“I have to split anyway. I’m going fishing in Peru with my son and I have to enter some receipts into QuickBooks.”
The buzzer went again.
“You better get that,” Dilger said. “Keep in touch, Spence.”
When the dial tone sounded, Mike hung up the phone and headed for the door and the stairs. Dilger had never taken his number. Mike also hated Dilger for not wanting to tell the old stories anymore.
Mike saw white wings through his door window until he understood the wings were the blowing panels from the woman’s dress. She was small and the gusts hit her, but she didn’t move. She kept her arms straight along her waist while the wind played in the silk. Her eyes were quiet tonight, not loud like they were on the leaves.
Schoolgirls and fiancées wore the
ao dai.
The dress was for virgins, the girls who sell orchids from baskets. He’d found out after a Google search.
He walked for the door laughing over her stunt.
Maybe she was the killer, this woman with chameleonlike eye energy, and she was avenging what the United States let North Vietnam do to Saigon after April 1975. She watched priests shot in their sanctuaries, schoolteachers raped and sent to reeducation camps, and her mother trade family jade, piece by piece, for dirty rice. Her father could have been a South Vietnamese army major, her uncle a Viet Cong sapper. The war may have erased her entire childhood.
But he laughed once more before he walked outside and she came warm and unsmiling into his arms. They had not met eyes very long. He was sure this woman made too much money to even consider revenge. In the wind, her
ao dai
panels twisted around his waist and he floated when her wet lips brushed his own. If she was mad about having been a boat person, she wasn’t anymore.
16
Goetzler read the brief in the
Tribune
’s Metro section about Rosen being murdered. The police department didn’t have a suspect, or a motive. The blurb went three lines, the space mostly taken by Rosen’s age and address. The reporter said nothing about the picture, and how the deceased’s clothes were identical to the executed Viet Cong’s. Goetzler then read the
Tribune
all week, mornings in the sauna, while caffeinated firemen, just off their shifts, poured water on the rocks and the steam made the newsprint run. There was nothing.
Tonight, he was driving to tell Annie what he’d done for her. He’d say it without saying it, the way he’d been practicing for three days.
You know, he told his reflection in the car window. They are smug because they said we’d fail in Vietnam.
After listening about the murder, Annie’s eyes almost cat quiet, she might tell him that his soldiering in Vietnam was humane and made a horrible situation bearable. You protected me from both sides, she’d tell him.
But Goetzler figured Annie would only look at him, and not being on the clock, refuse to recognize him. He’d simply confront her and explain what happened to Mike Rosen and remind her why it was a victory for them. He wanted her to hear, and remind her she was Vietnamese. He might jar her enough to remember what a small-town school district had defined away. This might be his chance to find her for real.
I watched good men die for your people, he’d tell her. You should love them with an open heart.
Goetzler had discovered that she rented in a three-flat a mile west of Wrigley Field. He also knew the cars that drove her to the dates, a black BMW and a blue Jeep Cherokee. One night, he’d waited in the elevator, keeping the door open, and watched her driver pull up. He then jumped back inside, after holding the elevator for himself, and went to the twenty-sixth floor. He also knew that Nick only serviced this neighborhood, and Annie worked Tuesdays and Thursdays. For a week, he drove between Lake Shore Drive and Sheridan, and waited to see the agency cars pulling out of high-rise roundabouts with her inside. It took him two Thursday nights, but he finally spotted Annie in the blue Jeep, driven by a grayed Italian in a leather jacket. He followed her home. The driver was too stupid to sense Goetzler’s tail. He was talking and looking at Annie in the rearview mirror.
She lived on Claremont, a long street of maples. Goetzler drove and looked for her number, 3329. Two three-flats had white Christmas lights wound about the locked wrought iron. He couldn’t imagine her among the sports bars and supermarkets and the coin-op Laundromats where new MBAs washed their Kellogg Business School running shorts among the last of the Mexicans. These were the cracked sidewalks she took to get a mocha latte and crumble berry cake. She wore sweatpants, and a baseball cap with her ponytail yanked through the size adjuster. He was sure she walked a dog and looked nothing like herself.
Across from Annie’s two-flat, Goetzler saw the panels of a white
ao dai
circle a man’s waist before he realized it was Annie hugging a man. He pulled his Jeep to the curb while the man lifted his wet socks from the concrete, stepped backward. He stopped when he felt Annie’s body give to him. The rain had formed the silk to her legs like hose. The man faced the door and held her, pulling their stomachs together. Annie was laughing while the rain disappeared into her forehead.
When Goetzler stepped from his Jeep, not knowing what he’d do with this man, Annie saw him immediately and smiled when they met eyes. She kissed at Goetzler from around the man’s head, but her unblinking stare told him that if he went any closer, she’d someday kill him with a hairpin.
Goetzler looked at the Jeep key in his small hand, and Annie didn’t blink until he returned to his driver’s seat. He drove away, wishing he’d not tried this, and thought himself stupid for opening the door.
With the man, Goetzler had seen Annie as a girl-
sanh
stooped outside Tan San Nhut selling orchids, but after Annie spotted Goetzler, she transformed into the madam of a Cholon whorehouse filled with Cav Scouts in Saigon for twenty-four hours. Like the madams, she’d kill you with a cracked porcelain vase while you slept.
Looking at her with the man, a stunned athletic guy in stocking feet, Goetzler remembered Saigon and how the Cav Scouts slapped his shiny MP helmet liner, and laughed at his small hands in white MP gloves. He and Olszewski were always called to the grafted brothels to break up fights. The madam’s payment required an officer and senior NCO to always respond, not two baton-happy private first classes with a hundred days left in Vietnam.
We fight the gooks, the Cav Scouts would say, and the MPs fight us.
But Sergeant Olszewski always saved Goetzler. There’s a fucking officer center, he’d tell these surly grunts in from Tay Ninh. Goetzler would walk quickly among them while they laughed at his fogged glasses, claiming the defroster off a ’60 Impala couldn’t dry those specs. He never remembered the Cav Scouts treating him differently, even after he started wearing longer white gloves to enlarge his hands.
17
Annie looked in the cop’s shower and imagined his woman’s shampoo bottles. She would have the two Suave conditioners afforded a cop’s wife, down from the six of her late twenties when she’d had her own place. He’d gotten towels since she left; the cotton felt stiff. She could see where he’d taken down a medicine cabinet. There was no mirror in the bathroom and she laughed because some nights she’d watched him stare into the window glass.